Everyone is always on a diet.
Okay, so that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but not too big of one. People want to feel like they’re watching what they eat.
You (or in this case, me) want people to eat as much of the dessert as possible so that you don’t have it sitting around and you end up eating all of it. What to do? Well, the best way I’ve found to get people to eat MORE dessert may surprise you.
I have a big holiday party every December. I bake a LOT. Too much, really, but it’s fun. I’ve never made any full cakes because I know no one will cut into a cake when there are so many other bite-sized options around. But one of the first years I had the party I did make cupcakes. And you know what I found?
Cupcakes are big.
And that’s fine if you’re having, I dunno, a BBQ or a casual dinner with friends because those cupcakes are the dessert. However, for this party it was very much the wrong choice.
Because I had SO MANY other desserts, the full-sized cupcakes were just too much food and no one touched them. Instead of taking cupcakes off the menu, though I just pivoted to making little mini cupcakes. If you want to do that you’ll need to buy a cupcake tin for little cupcakes, and it’s a little more work filling up all those little cups.
I never advocate buying a utensil for just one recipe because you’ll end up never using it again and most people don’t have room in their kitchen for all that extraneous crap. However, you can cook so many things in these mini cupcake tins that in this case it’s worth it.
Plus…people will eat them. They’ll eat a LOT of them. So, that’s the secret…if you want people to eat more – make the desserts smaller. Bite-sized.
People who won’t touch a single regular-sized cupcake will eat 8, 9, 10 or more of the little ones – far more dessert than one regular cupcake. It’s just human nature. You grab one, you lose count of how many you’ve had…and little bites have soooo fewer calories. Really, hardly any.
Ugly Desserts 